Dept. of Big Cannons

“My poems are so stupid,” Mao Zedong told his biographer, Robert Payne, in 1946. “You mustn’t take them seriously.” Despite the future Chairman’s protestations, a new edition of Mao’s verse has just been released, and by most accounts, his work has much more literary merit than either Stalin’s love poems or Saddam Hussein’s romance novels. Mao was an obsessive versifier and calligrapher. According to Payne, he “was always writing poems during boring party meetings, and when he had finished, he would simply toss them on the floor.”

Richard Nixon may have called Adlai Stevenson an “egghead,” but when the President needed to prepare for his 1972 visit to China, he hit the books. Nixon especially admired the fictionalized philosophical dialogues with Mao in André Malraux’s “Anti-Memoirs,” and invited Malraux to the White House for dinner and advice. When Nixon made the trip, he carried a volume of Mao’s poems with him, committed a few lines to memory, and recited them to Mao when they met. According to Nixon’s memoirs, Mao responded with more self-deprecation, saying, “I think that, generally speaking, people like me sound like a lot of big cannons.”

But Nixon wasn’t the only one who had read ahead. As the Americans left the meeting, Mao stopped Nixon in the hallway. “Your book, ‘Six Crises,’ is not a bad book,” he said.—Rollo Romig